On Jan 28, 2008, at 9:14 PM, George Fremin III wrote:
> You have the station hardware to make the big scores without calling
> the rovers up on the phone during the contest.
The good rovers don't answer the phone anyway, we're too busy making
contacts. Welcome to Mr. Voice Mail. Leave a message, call you back
next weekend! LOL!
I only answer the cell phone for a SELECT few and NEVER for the
purpose of making contacts. FAMILY is one (my wife and my dad, who
are both hams, and in theory COULD work me but we wouldn't set up a
contact on the phone... the call is to make sure I'm OKAY... not for
contesting), and I keep a "safety watch" with a few local hams that I
know are also on and contesting who ring up if they haven't heard me
in a long time... and who know I'm out in the middle of nowhere.
They *might* get a hint as to my location by accident, but that's
never the intent, and I avoid telling that if possible, since I know
they're playing in the contest too. The type of thing that might
sneak out would be, "What town are you stopping in for the night? You
find a safe place to pull over somewhere, or what?"... Because they
know I tend to just pull over and sleep... hotels mean expenses that
will keep me from buying another band the next year!!!! (GRIN!!!)
(With the recent addition of APRS, some of them probably won't even
call anymore if they can figure out that I'm out there and moving...
if I'm moving, I'm obviously still alive... but there's a lot of
places I go where APRS digis aren't going to reach, that's for sure.
Recently we've had some rovers wandering up to the tops of our two
14,000' peaks so maybe they'll take APRS along and the only packets
I'll hear for 200 miles will be weak ones from them??? Heh... who
knows. I doubt it. 100 miles east of the Colorado Front Range, and
the GPS shows nothing but a line where your little 2-lane road you're
on is, and the radios go nice and quiet...)
An interesting new aspect of the Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas rovers,
lost out on the prairie will be if APRS turns out to be useful at all.
Last year, I also answered a surprise call from a Rover friend
thousands of miles away at the END of the contest, just so we could
talk a bit about how we did. The QUIET cell phone was a nice change
of pace after two days of white noise. As I recall... we both just
wanted to go home and go to bed... and the talk on the phone was a
nice way to ignore the hundred or so miles we both had to go home from
our last grid squares... he was in Canada somewhere, I was near
Cheyenne, WY and had a 5-10 mile drive on the dirt just to get back to
I-25, and then 120 miles or so to get home... and work the next day.
I usually don't even get the antennas off the Jeep until Tuesday...
but since our Monday night 2m SSB net is there on the following
Monday, it's fun to leave 'em on for one more day... 12' mast and all.
Frankly I'm driving hundreds of miles in a single weekend, and
couldn't care LESS what anyone thinks about how I use my mobile phone,
when they're sitting in a comfy chair at home... but I don't break the
rules, and figured I'd mention how it REALLY goes, out in a hot dusty
car with piles of radios. I'm too busy to mess with phone calls, most
of the time. I'm on a mission to get to the next grid, ask any rover
I've met coming the other way on the road... a quick flash of the
headlights, a quick pull over to say hi... maybe work 'em on all bands
if we haven't in that grid, and then I GOTTA GO! More grids means
more points by a MULTIPLIER for me... I ain't messing with the phone
or standing around handing out Eyeball QSO cards... we can do THAT at
the Hamfest!
"Super glad you came out! We always need more Rovers! See ya, gotta
drive! Don't forget to check in on the Monday night Net so we can all
hash out how much fun we had!" :-) :-) :-)
--
Nate Duehr, WY0X
nate@natetech.com
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